Why Raymond Carver's legacy keeps on growing

Twenty years after his early death, Raymond Carver's literary reputation is higher than ever. By Kasia Boddy

It was 20 years ago today that Raymond Carver died from cancer aged just 50. Although his final years were marked by warm attention from the literary establishment, few would have predicted how central and secure Carver's place in the story of 20th-century American literature would become.

Today we can trace his influence on writers as diverse as Jay McInerney, Haruki Murakami and AL Kennedy. An International Raymond Carver Society was founded in 2005, and the first issue of an online Raymond Carver Review appeared late last year.

As interest in the man's stories has grown, so too has interest in the story of the man. Like many who die young, Carver has become a legend, which is another way of saying that a lot of people have a stake in promoting their version of him as the authentic one.

To some extent, Carver participated in the process, particularly in the often-repeated story of his two lives. The first - which he called his "Bad Raymond" life - was marked by alcohol, financial struggle and marital turmoil.

The second, alcohol-free, life lasted only 10 years, but brought a new relationship and literary success; Carver described it as "pure gravy".

In his last months, he documented both parts in a book called Carver Country, which he worked on with his second wife, Tess Gallagher, and the photographer Bob Adelman. Extracts from stories and poems are placed alongside their photographic "sources", both people and places.

Identifying sources also forms a large part of the many memoirs that appeared after Carver's death.

In 1993, for example, a "composite biography" was published in which 40 contributors reinforced with a wealth of anecdote the "two lives" tale: "the first all but destroyed by poverty and alcoholism, the second redeemed by love and growing fame".

Tess Gallagher has contributed numerous essays, poems and stories about the relationship, and in 2006, Carver's first wife, Maryann Burk, published her version of his "first life". Both women draw attention to the real-life elements, and their own parts, in his stories.

Carver also appears as a character in at least two novels. Chuck Kinder's Honeymooners (2002) is a roman à clef about adultery, alcohol and literary ambition in Seventies California. (Kinder, incidentally, was the model for the shambolic novelist in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys.)

Mark Maxwell's That Other Lifetime (1997) imagines the dying Carver striking up a friendship with Richard Nixon. They bond while fishing.

In the midst of all this mythologising, the reason for Carver's fame - his writing - sometimes gets forgotten.

Asked to talk about the relationship between Carver's life and art for yet another memoir, Richard Ford complained that the very question was an "arrogant disservice to his work", while Tobias Wolff replied that he "would like to see Ray regarded as the great artist he was, and not as somebody who had a terrible life that he wrote about".

No one has worked harder to promote Carver as a great artist than Tess Gallagher.

To date, she has ensured the publication of two collections of his poetry - A New Path to the Waterfall (1989) and All of Us (2000) - as well a volume of uncollected writing, No Heroics, Please (1991), which expanded to include some newly discovered stories in 2000 as Call If You Need Me.

She also collaborated with Robert Altman in his 1993 adaptation of nine Carver stories, Short Cuts.

More recently, Gallagher has been working towards the publication of Beginners, containing the unedited and much longer versions of the 17 stories that appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the 1981 collection that made Carver's name and made "minimalism" fashionable.

Today What We Talk About has become notorious. Researchers given access to the archives of Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, have revealed both the full extent of his involvement in shaping the volume, and Carver's unhappiness about the process.

Lish once located Carver's "value" in his "sense of a particular bleakness". Most of his editing seems to have been an attempt to heighten this sense, by cutting introspection, description and anything he felt tended towards the sentimental or epiphanic.

Lish added as well as subtracted - paragraph breaks between lines of dialogue, enigmatic titles and the limited, repetitive vocabulary of what became known as "K-Mart Realism".

"Beginners" (first published in the New Yorker last December) lost 12 pages and became "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love".

The effect was to give the collection a distinctive, unified voice. Pithy summations, such as David Newlove's "Hopelessville…in prose as sparingly clear as a fifth of iced Smirnoff", turned Carver into a definable, and therefore marketable, commodity. The collections in which Lish's involvement was more marginal, Will You Please Be Quiet Please? (1976) and, particularly, Cathedral (1983), are more various in tone.

Last year the literary agent Andrew Wylie, representing Gallagher and the Carver Estate, began negotiations about publishing the stories in the form they assumed before Lish wielded his black marker.

These have culminated in the decision of the Library of America to bring out a "Collected Stories" in 2009. Alongside the previously published collections, the volume will include the full, unedited text of Beginners.

Paperback editions of Beginners - translated into everything from Dutch to Japanese - will follow. No doubt some readers will continue to prefer the edited versions. But that is not the point, says Wylie. For the first time, he argues, readers will be able to make "logical" sense of Carver's development as a writer.

Negotiations between authors and editors have long fascinated scholars. Ezra Pound read The Waste Land and urged TS Eliot to give up the word "perhaps" and to tone down the disgust; Eliot responded by dedicating the poem to il miglior fabbro (the greater craftsman).

But Wylie feels the better comparison is with William Faulkner, many of whose works were not published in the form he had intended until the Eighties and Nineties.

"People don't fully grasp the pressure that a writer can be under when they are dealing with a combination of need and authority," says Wylie.

While controversies about where one can find the "real" or the best version of Carver's work look likely to continue, a more traditional kind of memorial can be found in Norfolk's Classic Roses nursery.

Naming plants after writers is nothing new. One can start the season with the small-cupped daffodil "Barrett Browning" and end it with the lavender pompon dahlia "Franz Kafka". The relationship between plant and author is not always apparent.

In the case of Rosa "Raymond Carver", however, there is a story.

One of Carver's final poems, "Cherish", is about watching Gallagher prune the roses they were given as a wedding present. The poem, partly about the talismanic effect of names such as "Cherish" or "wife", draws on the old association of roses with mortality. It ends as the speaker's breath becomes a "hurried petal".

Thinking of this poem, and his friend's love of yellow roses, Christopher MacLehose, Carver's British publisher, approached the rose specialist Peter Beales about naming a rose.

While "Raymond Carver" - a "tall, free-flowering shrub, bearing old-fashioned style amber coloured subtly fragrant flowers on the ends of strong stems" - may not express the essence of Raymond Carver or his writing, it is, Beales notes, already "making a mark" in the rose world.